Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 21/06/2026 00:44:00

On the corner of Coventry Street, near Leicester Square in the heart of the West End, the Prince of Wales Theatre is a long-running London playhouse best known in recent years as the home of large-scale musicals. The present building, with around 1,150 seats on two levels, dates from 1937. The first theatre on the site opened in 1884 as the Prince's Theatre, designed by the architect C. J. Phipps for the actor-manager Edgar Bruce. It was renamed the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1886, after the future King Edward VII. Its early success came with the comic opera Dorothy, which became the longest-running musical of its day. For much of its first life the theatre staged French-style revues and was sometimes called London's Folies Bergere. By the mid-1930s the owners decided to replace the building. The cinema and theatre architect Robert Cromie designed a new playhouse on the same site, its foundation stone laid by the singer Gracie Fields in 1937, and it opened that October with a non-stop revue. The mid-20th century brought a series of comedies and musicals, and the venue became established as a West End house for popular shows, including long runs that have repeatedly broken its own box-office records. The theatre was extensively refurbished in 2004 under its owner Cameron Mackintosh and reopened by the then Prince of Wales at a gala performance of the musical Mamma Mia, which went on to become one of the longest-running shows in the theatre's history. In 2013 the comedy musical The Book of Mormon arrived, winning a clutch of awards and setting new sales records, and it has been a fixture of the theatre ever since. A Grade II listed building owned by Delfont Mackintosh Theatres, the Prince of Wales sits between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, well placed to draw theatregoers in the busiest part of the West End.